Transart MFA alum Derek Owens publishes "The Villagers"

The Villagers

art by Caroline Golden and fables by Derek Owens

The Villagers, by Caroline Golden & Derek Owens

A master of disguise tries to seduce the sun... a horticultural club tours a dream-garden… a fishwife is serenaded by a severed head … a lunar king appeals to the people of earth one last time…

These are a few of the characters you'll meet in this collection of 37 tales, each conjured by Derek Owens in response to the surreal art of Caroline Golden. You are formally invited to enter this enchanted everwhen: an eclectic gallery of whimsical souls; a chorus of voices fanciful, dark, and strange.

The Villagers, by Caroline Golden & Derek Owens

Caroline Golden was inspired by the ‘supporting cast’ in stories. She says, “As a child I was always curious about the supporting cast residing within those magical spaces; what untold stories might they have to share?” As an artist, she painstakingly brought them to life in a series of hand-cut collages titled ‘The Villagers’. These characters sat hidden in a drawer until, in the peculiar liminal space created by the COVID-19 pandemic, poet and author Derek Owens chanced upon some of them via Instagram. He approached Caroline with the idea of writing in response to them, and she agreed. Derek says, “I'd study one of her Villagers before going to bed, or before taking an afternoon nap and then, upon waking, start scribbling the fables sprouting from her fanciful characters.” And so The Villagers, a unique collaborative work, was born.

Published by Animal Heart Press

The Villagers, by Caroline Golden & Derek Owens

What people are saying:

“Wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful, the worlds that The Villagers open are deep and contradictory: startling yet safe, sparkling yet darkling. ”  
—Molly Peacock, author of Flower Diary and The Analyst: Poems

“With The Villagers, Owens and Golden have created four books in one—a fablage: A book of dangerous fables, and a book of unsettling collages; a set of works engaged in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy, and a procession of texts and images that refuse to acknowledge one another. In this out-world, the ‘villagers’ are us.”  

—Michael Blitz, author of Jon Stewart: A Biography and On the Surgeon’s Knife 

“If you want to observe a place outside realms anywhere on Earth, yet simultaneously including practically everything Earth does, read this book.”  

—Christopher Funkhouser, author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry and Contributing Editor at PennSound

“Derek Owens constitutes an intractable independency which you may find on the map of the imagination somewhere between the Duchy of Donald Barthelme and the Principality of Jorge Luis Borges. One’s passage through these landscapes has been rendered yet more hallucinatory by the collages of Caroline Golden, who has done for Owens what Magritte did for Belgium. Her portrait-like images are at once cozy and disquieting, playful and grotesque, like a set of Toby Jugs acquired as souvenirs on a holiday in the world of the dead.” 

—Jacob Rabinowitz, author of the Beat generation memoir Blame it on Blake